Big Bad Wolfe

An activist launches a campaign to oust Secretary of State Kate Brown.

NOT BY THE HAIRS OF THEIR CHINNY CHIN CHINS: Portland City Club excluded third-party candidates like Bob Wolfe (center) and Pacific Green Party candidate Seth Woolley (left) from the club’s Oct. 26 debate for secretary of state. - IMAGE: vivianjohnson.com

A light drizzle fell on Bob Wolfe as he stood outside a
citadel of the Portland establishment like the lupine nemesis in the
story of the Three Little Pigs.

Wolfe was rattling
the doors of the Portland City Club’s luncheon debate Oct. 26 at the
Governor Hotel between Secretary of State Kate Brown and her Republican
challenger, Dr. Knute Buehler. Wolfe is also on the ballot as the
Progressive Party’s candidate. But no matter how loud he knocked, the
City Club would not let him in.

City Club officials denied Wolfe access because (as they said in an Oct. 17 email to him) he isn’t a “viable candidate.”

Wolfe won’t win, but
his only goal is defeating Brown, whom he accuses of suppressing Oregon
voters by routinely invalidating tens of thousands of petition
signatures.

He barreled into the
secretary of state’s race late, on Aug. 28, after Brown’s office said a
measure to legalize marijuana, for which he was chief petitioner, didn’t
qualify for the November ballot. He now wants to draw votes away from
Brown using the potency of Oregon’s marijuana legalization supporters.

In the May primary,
Wolfe helped raise $200,000 in national marijuana money for now-Attorney
General Ellen Rosenblum (who’s married to WW publisher Richard
Meeker). He spent another $50,000 on radio ads bashing her opponent,
Dwight Holton, who as U.S. attorney for Oregon targeted medical
marijuana clinics.

“You need to see an
alignment of the stars for that to happen,” Davis says. “It really helps
to have two candidates that people aren’t comfortable with, and you
don’t have that here.”

Outside the debate,
Wolfe waved a poster with a red “X” superimposed on his face above the
caption “Banned.” A motley crew of his supporters competed with
fresh-faced Brown campaigners for the attention of passersby.

Wolfe, 50, is an ex-Navy submariner who’s run the Oregon Pinot Noir Club, a mail-order wine seller since 1994.

He entered politics
by happenstance rather than design. In 2010, he says, his ex-wife was
suffering from ovarian cancer and sought Wolfe’s help in obtaining
marijuana. “I don’t smoke marijuana, and I’m not a marijuana lifestyle
guy,” Wolfe says. “I’m a red-wine man.”

Wolfe says he found
Oregon’s medical marijuana law forbidding but also endangered. In 2011,
Wolfe says, he traveled to Salem 40 times to help protect the law.
National marijuana legalization supporters subsequently enlisted him to
promote a 2012 ballot initiative for legalization.

“I said, ‘It sounds
like fun and it sounds useful, so I’ll do it,’” Wolfe says. “I figured
I’m relatively smart and well-spoken. How hard can it be?”

Very hard, as it
turned out. In April, Brown said Wolfe’s campaign was illegally paying
signature gatherers and fined him $65,000. Wolfe is contesting that
fine. Wolfe then turned in 169,214 signatures—plenty, he says, to
qualify for the November ballot. Brown’s office disqualified nearly half
of them.

Wolfe claims many
were valid signatures rejected on technical grounds. (An unaffiliated
pot legalization initiative, Measure 80, made the ballot.) Wolfe accuses
Brown of ratcheting initiative rules too tightly to make it more
difficult for anti-tax activists to qualify ballot measures. He says his
measure was collateral damage.

“I’ve voted a
straight Democratic ticket since I was 18,” Wolfe says. “The first time
I’ve ever not voted for a Democrat was last week, when I voted for
myself.”

Wolfe plans on
sending out as many as 200,000 campaign mailers, and he’s using a
50,000-name email list and strong relationships with marijuana advocates
and bloggers. Wolfe also writes snappy copy. He’s spent $26,000,
including buying radio ads in four markets, some of which feature Ralph
Nader attacking Brown on the very issue she’s used against Buehler:
voter suppression.

Wolfe points to
statistics that show signatures were validated at a far lower rate this
year for his and others’ measures than they were in past Oregon
elections or in Washington state. “I’m trying to protect the initiative
system,” he says.